An ironic article to write given the Forbes AI voiceover and AI article summary...
Zedstrian
joined 1 year ago
Astroturfing will come, but the platform itself can't as easily be designed to enable it with preferential algorithms and tracking. If an instance injects ads into its frontend, users can easily switch instances or use an alternative frontend or app; if a specific instance is known to host promotional posts, it can be easily defederated or otherwise blocked.
The same cannot be said for blocking ads or tracking on Reddit, particularly for mobile users.
It's just a bit two-faced and dishonest for Reddit to be marketing itself to users as a platform for genuine discussion while in actuality being a marketing platform for brands.
If more Redditors realized what Reddit has become, they might be more willing to join a platform without the centralized control that enables manipulation.
"For communicators, Reddit's value is in the real conversations that people are having about your brand today, not where it surfaces tomorrow," said Adam Collins, Reddit's chief communications officer.
Reddit defining its platform as a place for consumers to discuss brands speaks volumes about its motives.
They're definitely more likely to be used by AI than by the average person, but I think that's in large part because people aren't generally taught to use them, along with their absence from keyboards.
Since keyboards have two minus sign keys, I have a script running on my computer to automatically replace one of their inputs with an em dash.
Em dashes being associated with AI is a disservice to them; in many cases they're a far more suitable use of punctuation in interrupting a sentence than parentheses.
In this instance, however, the em dashes between the first and second parts of sentences would be better replaced with semicolons than commas, in my opinion.
The AI industry is actively telling companies that they can become 'more efficient' (i.e. fire workers) with AI; that's more than a mere 'messaging problem'.
It has a financial interest in companies firing their workers and raising prices to make room for it.
Even a 5% fee is 5% too high; letting Apple tax all sales on iOS merely because they control the operating system is monopolistic.
Their point is that Claude is now engineering its responses to specifically conform to a detectable pattern, something that can of course be easily removed via a seperate LLM.
AI agents have no agency of their own; their operators are the ones with that control. Negligence in giving an AI agent access to the internet does not absolve the operator of liability.
More OEMs should ship devices with Linux as an option, discounted by the Windows license cost.
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